Interesting stuff on Semantic Web; my idea that I am going to hash out

Danny Ayers links to Peter Norvig's comments on the Semantic Web. Both Danny's and Peter's comments are well worth reading.

Later today(*) I plan on updating my "Jump-starting the Semantic Web" white paper, but here are the basic ideas I want to explore:

I have been thinking about an idea mentioned in Antoniou's and van Harmelen's "Semantic Web Primer" (a nice book, BTW): use ontologies like (in an object oriented sense) an interface to information. Good Java style calls for coding to interfaces so underlying implementation classes can be modified, swapped for other classes implementing the same interface, etc. Consider a similar strategy for dealing with mass amounts of information that uses different vocabularies, formats, etc.:
  • create an ontology for information that is high value to your business
  • identify sources of raw data for the topics covered in this ontology
  • write custom connectors to the raw data sources that convert vocabulary, understand the data source formats, etc.
  • search and information retrieval is through the ontology
  • profit!
Peter Norvig's statistical approaches sound much more interesting and with the resources at Google it will be interesting to see what they can do. Anyway, I have more to add to my white paper.

(*) when I get up! My wife and I are still in bed at 9:40am with our wireless laptops, coffee, baby parrot(**), and Italian Greyhound. Lazy! :-)

(**) Brady spends more time sitting either on the top edge of my laptop screen or my desktop flat panel monitor in my office than you would believe - he behaves himself well enough so that this is not usually a problem.

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